Video: Jessica Beinecke started a daily video feature for Voice of America that has gone viral in China. She focuses on elements of American culture and slang and uses her fluent Mandarin to teach her lessons.
After a show featuring the word “sick” — “sick as a dog,” “sick and tired,” “call in sick,” one viewer wrote, “Woooow, I feel not good, coz I’m extremely missing my girlfriend . . . How to describe this? Missing sick?”
“You’re ‘lovesick’!” Beinecke responded.
They also correct her Chinese. “They say, ‘Bai Jie, you said that wrong,’ and I go, ‘Oops, my bad,’ and they learn how to say ‘my bad.’
English teachers in China tell her they present “OMG!” to students. Chinanews.com, an online news site, has reported that “huge chat rooms” have opened to discuss “OMG!,” with many viewers re-posting the videos on other Chinese sites. Although the Chinese government tries to block VOA’s more serious Chinese-language news shows, it tolerates their English-teaching programs.
Fans seem delighted to hear fluent Mandarin from such an unlikely looking source. It’s key to her appeal, said Yuyang Ren, 23, a Chinese native who produces the show. “She looks like just what Chinese people think Americans look like,” Ren said.
Beinecke, an Ohio native, studied Mandarin at Ohio University and Middlebury College and in China. After college, she found a job at Voice of America through Monster.com. After three days of doing translation and research for the agency, she was asked if she wanted to try television.
The result was a travel show, broadcast monthly, in which Beinecke shoots in places such as New York and Las Vegas and talks about them mostly in Mandarin. But, eager to do something more frequent and interactive, she developed “OMG!,” which began running in July.
Each show has a theme — relationships, fashion, showering, colors — for which Beinecke finds American expressions that don’t appear in most English-teaching curricula. In Chinese, subtle variations in tone can result in different meanings of words. But as Beinecke points out, the English spoken by American youth has its own nuances.
When texting, she cautions, don’t confuse BFF (best friend forever) with BF (boyfriend). Using “BTdubs,” however, is the same thing as saying “BTW,” which stands for “by the way.”
Beinecke said she hopes her “online friends” will learn that life in America is not how it appears in the movies. “This is not ‘Jailbreak.’ This is not ‘Gossip Girl,’ ” she said. “We all like to hang out, get a bowl of noodle soup and talk to our friends, and this will show that there’s a few English phrases to use while you do that.”
Last week, she ran into a fan, Jiawei Wang, 21, a recent immigrant from China who was working in a Taiwanese bubble tea shop in Rockville, where Beinecke was filming her travel show. A marketing student at Montgomery College, Wang moved to Maryland two years ago but engages online in a Chinese chat room, where participants discuss what they learned on “OMG!.”
“American language is quite different from what we learn” in college, he said in heavily accented English. “We learn how to write papers about marketing. She teaches us how the young guys talk. Yeah, she’s cool.”
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